2381: The True Name of the Bear

2021-08-04T13:15:27Z

Muche: /* Explanation */ fix typo

{{comic
| number = 2381
| date = November 4, 2020
| title = The True Name of the Bear
| image = the_true_name_of_the_bear.png
| titletext = Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.
}}

==Explanation==
The Canadian Internet linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} [https://twitter.com/gretchenamcc/status/1113195661275611137 tweeted] about [https://www.charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html the theory] that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indo-European languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been "the brown one," and thus the modern word "bear" (derived from Germanic "beran") would more literally translate into the color "brown" rather than the animal.

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from modern languages that still use a word derived from it. In the comic, McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved in English had it not been superceded, but saying it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family.

Interestingly enough, the hypothesized word “arth” is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word “bear.” Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indo-European branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as do the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) branches, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms. Another Indo-European language where the word for bear is very close to this extrapolation is Armenian, where it's written [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/արջ արջ] and pronounced “artch”.

Depending on how one takes the concept of "saying a true name", {{tvtropes|FridgeLogic|fridge logic}} issues arise with this comic, adding to the absurdity of the situation depicted. If saying the "true" name (or any name derived from that name) summons the bear, how do Celtic and Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away with saying it without running into the same issue? Perhaps the bears only respond to certain languages, but that seems unlikely unless the words mutated specifically into some special sound bears responded to, since the languages that the bears would be prompted by would have developed thousands of years apart in time. An arcane form of {{w|geofencing}}, and/or a {{w|geas}} firmly tied to some prior mystically-established meta-contextualising, might limit such otherworldly 'magic' and explain why more mundane science and logic is usually unworried by these kinds of phenomena being inadvertently triggered.{{Citation needed}}

Joking aside, there can be actual good reason to avoid saying bear. For example, maybe when someone had a good harvest bears would have a tendency to come into town to investigate or raid their food store. After some time, people might have developed a tendency to discuss bears and lock up their food store after a good harvest, and so if people overheard discussion of bears from their neighbors, they might have all locked down their food stores, and bears could have learned to key in on the behavior of everyone locking their food stores to actually come into the city and raid them more in response{{Citation needed}} because they would have learned that people only lock up their food when they have a lot of it. Thus in a roundabout way, mentioning bears does summon bears.

Another possibility is that the "true name" of a bear is actually in a language the bear understands: possibly involving smells, body language, territorial or ecological interspecies behavior, and would actually reliably summon a bear because the person using it knew exactly what they were doing. Hunter-gatherers and very experienced trackers are known to interact with wildlife in such ways.{{Citation needed}} 

Use of true names appears to be [[1013: Wake Up Sheeple|highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale]], and it is also {{tvtropes|IKnowYourTrueName|a common trope}} elsewhere. Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is. In a competitive culture like ours, this could give others power over you, "profiling" you to be able to predict you and what you do.

Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (or her ghost) certainly found it effective, but [https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1324044826145378304 may reflect her extreme susceptibility to internet leakage].

The title text states that the bear that Gretchen summoned ate her, which means that Ponytail's attempt to stop Gretchen from summoning the bear was justified. However, the title text uses the phrase "brown one" instead of the word "bear". While saying the true name of the bear apparently does prompt a bear attack, as discussed in the comic, bear is not actually this true name, so it could be said safely without prompting a bear attack, as the characters did in the first few panels, so Randall could have used the word bear in the title text without being killed by a bear. In addition, while ''saying'' the true name of the bear apparently summons one, ''typing'' it probably does not (unless a bear is already close enough to be able to read the computer screen, in which case one already has to worry about a bear), so Randall could have typed "arth" without causing danger to himself. However, maybe Randall choose to avoid typing "arth" in the title text out of concern for the safety of people who cannot see or are hard of sight who would use screen-readers to say the title text out loud. Of course they would have a problem if they had a program that could read text from the comic, or if they went to explain xkcd and got the transcript read out loud. So seems like this would not be his concern. Rather it may be seen as something one of the other people from the comic said later.

(An alterative theory is that Randall just thought "the brown one" sounded funnier than "bear."){{Citation needed}}

In [[2421: Tower of Babel]] a linguist that resembles Gretchen from this comic appears. Since that story takes place in biblical time, it is not Gretchen, but obviously this is how linguists look in xkcd from now on.

==Transcript==
:[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.]
:Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear.
:Cueball: What?

:[Gretchen McCulloch, drawn with short, curly hair, comes on-panel from the right.]
:Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. "Bear" and "bruin" mean "the brown one." Its actual name has been lost.
:Cueball: Wow.
:Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

:[Zoom-in on Gretchen.]
:Gretchen: Well, sort of
:Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto-
:Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek "arktos" and Latin "ursus"

:[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with her hand on her chin.]
:Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English?
:Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be "arth"?
:Ponytail: ''No!!''

:[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.]
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Stop! AAAAA!''
:Gretchen: What??
:Ponytail (off-panel): Don't ''say'' it!

:[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.]
:Ponytail: What have you ''done''?
:Off-panel noise: <big>'''''ROAR'''''</big>
:Gretchen: Oh
:Gretchen: Oh no

== Trivia ==
The last comic strip that ended with the words "Oh no" was [[2314: Carcinization]], which also featured an unfortunate occurrence involving an animal as its punchline when Cueball spontaneously transformed into a crab.

{{comic discussion}}

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2381: The True Name of the Bear